A delightful take on film tribute to silent era
The Artist Theatre Royal, Plymouth ★★★★☆
Lightning has struck twice for Michel Hazanavicius’s 2011 homage to Hollywood silent cinema. The Oscar winner is now reframed as an effervescent and delightfully inventive stage show. Directed, choreographed and co-adapted by Drew McOnie, it retains the charm and wit but makes unexpected additions and more emphatically celebrates the transition to the talkies.
McOnie’s production unfolds within the set designer Christopher Oram’s glowing art deco proscenium arch and has a superbly integrated video design by Ash J Woodward. As in the near-wordless original, the narrative is driven through title cards, music (newly composed by Simon Hale, with standards from the era), Variety-style headlines and expressive physical gesture.
McOnie’s lustrous dance routines add volume to the characterisation, whether it’s the incorrigible ham George Valentin (Robbie Fairchild) pirouetting at a party after chewing the scenery in his latest blockbuster, or his screen partner Constance (Rachel Muldoon) thrusting her rear in frustration at the spotlight-hogger.
Onstage equivalents for silent film techniques such as intercutting and montage follow George’s career, which crashes like Wall Street, and the simultaneous rise of the starlet Peppy Miller (Briana Craig). In the film, George and Peppy are bowled over by each other. In this script, co-adapted by McOnie and Lindsey Ferrentino, the real meet-cute is between George’s wife Doris (Ebony Molina) and her gardener (Will Bozier). Molina captures Doris’s heavy heart with a stillness that she slowly sheds in a winning performance.
Gary Wilmot makes a cordial studio honcho and Alexander Bean, as the chauffeur Clifton, has a standout scene where his steering wheel is replaced with a drum kit.
One of McOnie and Ferrentino’s main additions is commentary on sexism in the studio system. When Peppy speaks up, so do others, and the latter part of the show unfolds like a talkie – with only silent-era relic George still needing intertitles.
Tighter focus in the second half could ensure this adaptation does, as Variety might say, whammo biz at the box office.
Until 25 May